Europe is tired. It’s tired of crisis, tired of sameness and tired of change, tired of its elites and tired of its voters. Even the revolutionaries in the May Day parade last week in London seemed tired, their cheerful banners of Stalin and bobbing rows of hammers and sickles held by grey-bearded men in macs.

It might seem odd for Europe’s exhaustion to be the central argument in a polemic about immigration. But it was when I reached the chapter titled simply “Tiredness” in Douglas Murray’s book, The Strange Death of Europe, that I understood the nature of the “strange death” he describes. European civilisation, Murray argues, has left behind the rock-solid moral certainties of empire, passed through the disillusionment brought by two world wars and totalitarianism,...